


Spat Out Wrong

by IneffablePlan (Megafowl)



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Aziraphale Has PTSD (Good Omens), Codependency, Crowley Has PTSD (Good Omens), Experimental Style, M/M, Not Beta Read, Other, Past Abuse, Purple Prose, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, or at least a hopeful one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-10-01 19:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20374135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megafowl/pseuds/IneffablePlan
Summary: Love is crashing yourself on the rocks of someone elses desires.





	Spat Out Wrong

The thing about love, is it goes like being swallowed whole and spit out wrong:

It goes like stars, burning fiery holes through the comfortable dark of the fetal universe. Giants, luminous monsters, eating into the blanketing emptiness like embers through fabric. It goes like a kiss, breezing away the paint stains on a familiar old coat. Love goes like asking with a raspy voicelessness, a dearth of breath: _ was that right? Was that enough? Was that too much? _

_ Was that what you wanted? _

_ Are you pleased? _

Love goes. And it digs channels of wanting, pleading, of _ tell me I'm useful _ and _ tell me I'm needed. _ Tell him, the little serpent, shoestring-sharp with a nervous grin, how the knots he twists himself into are what is required of him. Tell him he will never be thrown away as long as he continues to serve, and tell him it's unconditional even then, when both parties know it's not and never has been and couldn't be; that's not how this works.

Love is a pen, writing in circles, spiralling inwards, indefinitely, constricting him into the same story over and over again. The only novel he knows is his outstretched hand, tantalisingly close to another, pages of never reaching, endlessly seeking warmth-comfort-acceptance (home). Coming back empty, letters like sand through an hourglass, sand through his fingers, a desert of lost time, and he's thrown away once again. Cast aside, locked out, no longer welcome (close the book).

The only poem his heart can recite ends at the beginning.

(Flip it over, start again.)

The thing about love: it goes like the waves. There he is, at the mercy of emotion, crashing himself on the rocks of someone else's desires, angel food cake and cocoa and crepes, _ show me a direction and your will is my own, my only path is your pointing finger. _ Stranding himself on the beach until he's tossed back to the waves, steadfast as the utter immutable knowledge the sun will rise in the morning.

It isn't fair. Neither is anything else. The universe: a collection of large and small injustices, and isn't he large and small himself? Little thing in the dirt, easily stepped on, too big to get out of the way.

Isn't that just how love goes?

Isn't it everything and nothing? A dense absence? A void, strained at the seams?

His new love, his new shore rocks, his new inky dark light-speckled endlessness, old as he is and not yet razor-edged from wear, doesn't see it the same. Doesn't see love as something to slice oneself on and bleed over indefinitely.

_ New star, twin soul, mirror mine, disastrous love. My terrible reflection, myself as I could only exist in a different fork of time, and I’ll stand with you until the end of it. _

At first, love is close distance. Love is a warm smile with cold backgrounds, the weightless promise of a soft landing. Love is words at face value. Love is moving in sync, obedience, love is being one of many, a group, a multitude acting as one. A sliver of a whole.

Molecule by molecule, the angel’s understanding of love comes to change.

Love means pushing away, denial. It means arm’s length, safety net, confessions heard (never spoken), walking away while he can still return. His home, his heart, his hearth and shelter, swaying around on loose-hinged hips, slouching observantly around him. Help if needed but never coddled. Wordless, silent, his supportive shadow.

The angel, then, knows acceptance. X-ray vision cutting a direct line to his flaws and becoming enamoured anyway, not _ in spite of _ but _ including _. He sees the interior of a car, bullet-hole stickers next to a face framed by red lights and red hair and the red of an uncertain future, his own hands holding liquid death in an unlikely container.

_ Here is the instrument of our mutual destruction, there is no hope in this box except that it never needs opening _.

Acceptance, gentle and soft and creeping, soothing into the cracks with its tender roots and rounding off the edges. Love, to the angel, is peaceful. Lazy dust motes in the back room, gentle, drifting, a forgotten mug of cocoa, newly re-warmed. The presence of a hand, even if taking it would mean love's removal, destruction, absolute loss. He'll content himself with knowing its existence, the necessary pain of turning it away.

That's how it spins, that's how it swallows, how it spits you back out with a chasm of fear rocketing through your very self. In the aftermath of a world, lives, reborn in fire, outstretched hands mutually reconcile, never again casting aside, finding themselves lightly chewed but largely whole and finally, peacefully, home.

**Author's Note:**

> TV Crowley and Aziraphale have a different dynamic than book Crowley and Aziraphale. I think it's mostly that there's higher stakes on their relationship but there's a different sort of coping they show between the two mediums and wanted to pick at it a bit because I found it interesting to explore. Sometimes parts of a relationship can be unhealthy without the whole thing being actually bad, like here, when one's been taught to express love by stifling themselves.


End file.
